Jane Doe January (7 page)

I choose an old photograph to send to the detectives and the prosecutor. Except for Bill, they didn't know me then. I want them to know who I was when it happened.

I dismiss my backstage and performance photos, which doesn't leave a lot. There are pictures from vacation with my mother that summer. That doesn't feel right either. Vacation is another kind of costume, not representative of the normal me.

Graduation was just eighteen months after the crime. It was a special event, not a normal day, but it was the culmination of all of my normal days there. Pittsburgh is a college town. Bill, Dan, Aprill, and Kevin the ADA will understand that kind of photo. They'll remember their own graduations, their school and college days; maybe, if they have kids, they'll think of them.

Most of my pictures from that day are group shots, and we're all facing in different directions, because there were so many cameras
held by so many parents. In my favorite one, I'm smiling straight on, and my friend Aaron has his arm around my shoulders. The red tassels on our mortarboards are midswing from us turning our heads.

I write, “I've attached a pic of me from back then. Well, 18 months later. I graduated on time.”

I let the message sit for a while instead of sending. The last sentence takes on a huge importance to me. I did it, despite the interruption forced on me:
I graduated on time,
from one of the most challenging conservatories in the country, despite not going back to school that Tuesday, despite three weeks off and dropping one class and sometimes, only rarely and when absolutely necessary, walking out for flashbacks or tears. Everyone in Pittsburgh knows the department's reputation. Everyone in theater knows it. They were kind to me, but I wasn't graduated out of kindness or pity. In the picture, the ribbon and medal representing university honors, and the white cords representing college honors, are clearly visible.

I hit my marks back then, and I can't help but compare that with now. I'm keeping up the whole parenting thing pretty well, and the whole personal life thing, but I've backed out of various commitments: judging a contest, hosting a lecture. I'm behind on finishing my current book. I'm late, I'm revising poorly, and it upsets me terribly. There's an unspoken equation in my head:
If I can finish this, then I'm okay.
Which means, of course, that not finishing makes me not okay. I try to work, but I fail, again and again. I'm told to take my time, but I don't think my publisher or agent really means it. Or, they mean it, but their indulgence will have consequences nonetheless.

I don't think that I was a better person back then, more persistent, more talented, more able. It's just that the structure of school, with all of the little built-in goals along the way, makes it easier to succeed. I toy with the idea of going back in to get another degree, just to hide in a system, to collect little approvals
in the form of grades, but I know that I don't really want assignments and exams again.

My kids' educations structure my days. It's soothing to to-and-fro them, to fuss over handwriting and algebra. S. will be a teenager soon, and measures his height against mine every morning, hoping for that last inch that will make him taller than me. W. still clings, pretends to be a cat, and reads
Captain Underpants
and
Calvin
and Hobbes
every day.

I show them the photo that I've chosen, though I don't tell them what it's for. “Look,” I say.

They recognize me, which is nice, considering the number of years between then and now. “Who's that guy?” they want to know; I explain that Aaron was a friend in my class. They move on, not surprised by or particularly interested in the picture. They know that I have degrees.

I keep looking at it.

It's easier to feel proud of oneself from a distance.

I'd gotten to hold my case file while we'd waited in the municipal court hallway for the hearing to begin. The folder they keep the papers in is twenty-two years old and looks it. My various contact addresses from over the years are scrawled on the outside of it.

Dan has scanned Bill's handwritten notes from that night for me, at my request. Now I can read them at my leisure. It's horrifying to do so, but some things must be gone through, not around.

I remember all of the main things, but little details have fallen through the sieve over time. Bill had caught them all that night, in pages of neat, rounded printing, as I'd narrated, without editing, within an hour after it happened. Each rediscovered detail is immediately familiar, and shocking, too, in how suddenly it slots into place.

According to Bill's notes, I had begged: “[Can] we find some
thing else to make you happy?” Meaning that I'd asked if I could finish him off by going back to one of the things he'd already made me do, instead of him doing the new thing that I really, really, really didn't want him to do. I had remembered that months ago, but had doubted myself.

The memory had been too much like a scene I'd written in a novel. One of my characters had tried to negotiate with her abuser this same way. When I prepared my testimony, I left it out, thinking that I was mistakenly conflating my own experiences with my books.

It's a given that I use observations and experiences from my own life in my books, but in this instance I hadn't just used a memory to influence a scene; I'd handed over the attempted negotiation completely, until it became just a scene and not, I'd repeatedly told myself, a memory. This unnerves me, and makes me want to excise all young women from my books, certainly from the one that I'm currently working on. I write far too many girls who lash out, I realize. It's repetitive, and lazy, and feels far too outside of my conscious control.

The line from the case notes that stands out most to me is something I'd apparently pleaded to Fryar:

“If I'm very good, will you not kill me?”

I make a list of all of our relative ages. It helps me to sort us out.

In January 1992, I was twenty-two. Bill was thirty. Fryar was almost forty.

Dan was twenty-seven then, working as a private investigator. Aprill was twenty-one, finishing college. That makes Dan older than me, and Aprill my peer, sharing the same high school graduation year. I'd thought of them as younger than me, much younger, I think because they're doing now what Bill was doing more than twenty years ago. They had seemed to me, both over the phone and even at the hearing, like a whole generation after us.

Turns out that we're all within a decade, all of us good guys: Aprill's forty-three, I'm forty-four, Dan's forty-nine, and Bill's fifty-two. We're all seventies kids. Well, Bill was a seventies teen. When we were learning to walk and talk, playing board games and listening to records, Fryar was already a grown man.

He's almost sixty-two now. There's little about him online, not further education, not jobs. There was a mention at the hearing of his having once been in the military, which seems right to me. He'd been good at cornering me, good at physically controlling me. At the hearing, he'd kept himself in check, not betraying emotions or even interest.

He'd been a child of the fifties, a teen of the sixties, in Beacon, New York, a now-touristy city upstate that, back then, simmered with racial tensions culminating in riots in the seventies.

Online, he lists his high school graduation year as 1972, when he would have been twenty. I suppose he must have had to repeat grades, or something had kept him out for a year or two, or maybe he'd started late or maybe his family had moved around. If he joined the military right out of high school, that could have put him in Vietnam.

Kevin, the prosecutor, is the baby among us. He's only thirty-five, so back when it happened he was just turning thirteen. That seems very young compared to who I was then, a college junior. If we'd grown up in the same town, I could have once been his babysitter.

But, with regard to my own children, thirteen seems nearly adult. S.'s treble voice is peaking; it will be gone within the year, but what a year it is, full of solos and concerts. It's hard to explain to most Americans that the British chorister system isn't historical reenactment or cosplay; it's a still-living tradition that seems extraordinary from the outside, but is, within its own rarefied world, just normal. These boys are singing in the places of all those who came before them, and will be replaced by eager new boys when they go. The leaving of boy trebles is unpredictable, and each new inch of height gives a hint that
there may not be much time left. When their voices finally change, it's not just the end of choir; it's the end of childhood. They're suddenly tall, hairy, oily, responsible, cocky, ambitious. One puts a boy into choir, and gets an almost-man out the other end.

Google Images' search results for “Arthur Fryar” have changed. The change reminds me of the way my memories shift, different aspects rising in priority at different times.

I can no longer find the pictures that had looked so immediately familiar. His profile pic is still up on Facebook, but there's little else of him around the Web now. I'm glad that I'd screenshot what there was five months ago.

I have three pictures. Two are of him younger, the way he was in 1992: plump with big round cheeks. One shows him more recently, same as before but with very gray hair. From time in jail now, he's less fat, and he's possibly shrunk a bit from age, so in court he looked comparatively slight as well as old.

At the hearing, even though I'm a “Jane Doe” to the public, I'd had to confirm my real name to the judge, even spelling it. I hadn't realized that Fryar would be allowed to know it. His right to face his accuser trumped my anonymity. All these years I've just been that girl from that Sunday to him; now he has access to everything online about me, which, for professional reasons, is quite a lot. I wonder if he's Googled me like I did him. I don't like him knowing who I am. I hadn't considered that finally finding out who he is would inherently involve an even trade.

Bill's notes refer to us as A. and V.: “actor” and “victim.” I know that some people hate the term “victim” and prefer to be called a “survivor” instead, but I don't mind the word. He did hurt me. I was a victim of that. It bothers me to euphemize it.

The first time I'd heard the word “actor” used to refer to the man, it had surprised me. The police who came to my apartment had
asked me: “Did you know the actor, ma'am?” (I was just twenty-two and already “ma'am.”) I was a drama student, so that word meant to me not just generic famous people, but specifically my friends, and neither definition made sense, nor the definition that implied that it was all pretend.

I'd thought,
But this really happened. He wasn't acting.
That's not what they'd meant, of course. They were using it like “perp” for “perpetrator,” meaning “the one who did it.” He'd taken action. He
did;
I'd been
done to.

One of the best things about getting a trial is that I will get to act: not act like “pretend” but act as in
do
. I get to be the actor, accusing and testifying, and he has to hold still, and be the victim of the process.

A friend I told about the prosecution was keen to get me to agree that the main point of the trial is to protect potential future victims, for which he commended me. He was troubled about aspects such as “punishment,” “vengeance,” and even “justice” as impractical and unseemly. But there's an immense difference between being pinned on my back on the floor of my college apartment and standing up in court. It's my right to get to do that, whether it saves anyone else or not. It's a gift, from the police and the district attorney and the state of Pennsylvania. I matter just as much as each potential future victim who may be spared.

One of the most powerful things a writer gets to do is to decide where stories start and end. I think this friend of mine believes that this story ended when Fryar left my apartment, and so that there's nothing more to be done for me; that's why he's thinking only of future others. I say that the story doesn't end till court, with me on my feet.

The arraignment and pretrial conference are happening today and I get the upsetting news that Kevin the ADA has been moved to
Homicide. The new prosecutor, Evan, seems to be even younger. He's been a lawyer for less than five years.

I don't want to start from scratch. I've already done the short version of testifying, with Kevin at the hearing. I wanted to build on that for trial—which I've been told will have me on the stand for longer—not have to explain it all over again to someone new. Kevin knows me now. At least, he was in the hallway and courtroom and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey office with me for a few cumulative hours. You can learn a lot about a person just by physically being in the same room. He heard my outburst to the defense attorney, and approved of it. He e-mailed me answers to my questions afterward, and even sent me transcripts of similar trials. I wanted him to stay on. I don't think it's too much to ask that the person who's going to be asking me desperately intimate questions in a public proceeding actually meet me first.

Kevin hasn't e-mailed to tell me. Evan hasn't e-mailed to introduce himself. I only found this out because I e-mailed Aprill, and she only knew because she'd run into Kevin in court.

The time difference means that it will probably be evening here before the meeting to decide the trial date ends in Pittsburgh. Friends who noted today in their calendars have started to e-mail and visit, being wonderful. Everyone wants to know when the trial will be.

I notice that I throw around the word “everyone” in what obviously can't be a literal way. I love that word and I don't want to change it to something more accurate. There's a level of “enough” that's so satisfying and safe that it might as well be “all.” There are enough people who know everything (another hyperbolic word, which here means “everything that matters”) that it feels like “everyone” here cares.